Center Faculty

	Sorin Istrail Professor of Computer Science Center for Computational Molecular Biology
The "Genome Era" started in 2001 when the Human Genome Project and Celera Genomics published the first assemblies of the human genome. Since then, high-throughput biotechnologies have generated genomic and proteomic data sets of unprecedented magnitude and complexity. Emerging from this data is an "informatics renaissance" led by computer science's new algorithmic, visualization and computing paradigms. Computational biology - with insights from experimental molecular biology, physics, chemistry and economics - is harnessing the complexity of biological systems by providing computational models and genomics tools that transform knowledge into scientific control over life science processes. Sorin Istrail, in his role as senior director and then head of the Informatics Research Group of Celera Genomics, has been instrumental in the company's human genome research. "My role was to lead the computational biology effort at Celera in the post-genome assembly phase. I built a dream team of genomic toolmakers. By creating powerful software libraries of tools for assembly comparison, annotation, mass spectrometry, SNPs and haplotypes, arrays, protein folding, and literature data mining, the informatics research team became, arguably, the leading computational biology group in the industry", Istrail said. Celera's labs teemed with energy as some of the world's best scientific minds united in a common goal. "It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and accelerated by at least 10 years the accessibility of genomes", Istrail said. "I loved working with opinionated, workaholic overachievers who, when tasked by inspiring leaders with solving exceedingly hard problems, made lasting scientific advances as a team", he said. "This defines the Celera spirit - a spirit I would like to recreate in an academic setting". "You need the smartest students, the best faculty, and they're here at Brown. We must work on the hardest problems". Biology is changing everything, especially computer science, Istrail said. The next generation of computer scientists will need to be renaissance men and women, with interests and skills not only in computer science, but in biology, physics, chemistry, and economics. "We need to rethink and reteach, to cross computer science with the interdisciplinary work in wet and dry labs... The most exciting and novel courses will mix experiments with computation". Istrail will hold the first chaired professorship at Brown's Center for Computational Molecular Biology. Before coming to the University, Istrail was a visiting associate at California Institute of Technology. He was at Celera Genomics from April 2000 through February 2005. Previously, he led the Computational Biology Project at Sandia National Laboratories (1992-2000), taught at Wesleyan University, and was a visiting scientist at MIT from 1985 until 1992. In 2000, he resolved a longstanding open problem in statistical mechanics, the Three-Dimensional Ising Model Problem. He is co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Computational Biology, co-founder of the RECOMB Conference Series, co-editor of the MIT Press Computational Molecular Biology book series, and co-editor of the Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics book series.